Have California Candidates Considered China?

As Silicon Valley goes, so goes Northern California, then the country. Silicon Valley, being the best metaphor for Technology, is the logical successor to the last Industrial Age, and software, naturally, will lead the world. This is exactly why the Google issue and China’s plans for the future is central to our livelihoods.

Shel Israel reminds us, "why this issue has huge implications" and, he offers, "If China deports Google, most of the world will praise [Google's] heroic stance. Other companies will need to think of the repercussions of continuing to collaborate with a government that spies on its citizens and abuses those who seem to foment unrest. Likewise, if China deports Google, it will at a minimum have a dent on it’s relationship with its emerging, well-educated citizens particularly the 350 million of them who use the Internet and have experienced the frustration of being blocked."

Global Times the Communist Party English newspaper tells an interesting and surprisingly diplomatic story. The editorial reminds us that Confusicous gave us all the Golden Rule, and that they think we might be acting a bit self righteous in our demands for an inquiry and on censorship. The quaint little piece of prose suggests that our own FBI was just caught doing to us, what we are accusing China of doing to us? A Gotcha maybe? Then the Internet has a lot of information and they found this, "The US is the first country to launch cyber warfare. According to a US defense expert Joel Harker, it has a cyber army of nearly 80,000 people equipped with over 2,000 computer viruses. Washington’s continuous resort to double standards goes far beyond these. As a core holder of cyber technology, the US controls on its territory the world’s master terminal server and nine of the 12 secondary terminal servers, which keep the Internet running."

We think China and all of Asia is huge for our lives and our futures and we thought we’d check in with the leaders applying to run Silicon Valley and the rest of California this fall. We are talking about the governor’s race and the Senate seat open that Barbara Boxer now occupies. Tom Campbell and Carly Fiorina will battle it out for the Republican nomination. The governor’s race is not happening on the social networks thus far, but we’re eager to hear what Meg Whitman and Roger Poizner think about what’s going on with this topic. We thought it would be a good idea to check in and see if any of the candidates were using social networking to grow their campaign and see if we could get some answers to the following questions:

What are the stakes for technology and California in the China discussion?

What are we asking of China?

Should such an important, dynamic, discussion be extemporaneous

We’ve reached out to the candidates but haven’t heard back. We’ll keep tracking the ethyr to see if we can get answers and hopefully understand who the candidates are and where they are on this most important topic. If you would like to add some questions, or share some candidate news, hawk@nethawk.net

2 Responses to Have California Candidates Considered China?

The US, at our expense, fully supports the public Internet and China is using that to say that we are spying? China is know to spy on its own people (and likely anyone of interest to them) and to steal IP and other assets from all companies that do business in China. They are at fault in this. Regardless of what others are doing.

Ajay, I don’t think anyone disagrees with you, the only question raised is this the best way to get a good result? Blogs and tweets are great for chatter, but I’d rather see a serious, quiet sitdown over this without dragging out some quid pro quo on what sort of intelligence gathering is going on. Jobs and business opportunities are at stake, and we think the stakes are too high for emotions on the front end.